Bitter Possibilities
by The Ladies Luck
Summary: Could be seen as an explanation for all those OC Vizards out there...


In Volume 26 OF THE Bleach manga, when Orihime has slipped through Hachi's shields around the Vizards' warehouse, and the Vizards are having minor panics, Kensei says, "Who is it then? Other Vizards?!" This one line got me to thinking.

The Vizards were supposed to be test subjects, hm? Their being captured by Seireitei and subsequently rescued by Urahara, meant that Aizen most probably didn't have much time to study the effects of Hollowfication- among other shortcomings. Therefore, it's not too much of a stretch to think that he might have experimented further, with other subjects. With no Urahara around, the death and complete Hollowfication rate was probably much higher- but there's always the possibility that some survived.

And thus there is canon room given for OC Vizards.

**Bitter Possibilities**

It wasn't often that captains of the Gotei 13 left their respective Divisions outside of work hours. If Rukia Kuchiki was honest with herself, she could believe the captains of Eighth and Eleventh had their little exploits.

She'd never have believed it if someone had thought to tell her that her noble brother was sitting on the floor of Thirteenth's record offices, cross-legged amongst a pile of papers and books that was growing steadily larger. Jyuushiro Ukitake was watching him from the open doorway, growing more and more bemused with every sheet of paper Byakuya put aside.

He looked like a man on a mission, Ukitake thought.

Early that morning, Byakuya had arrived at Thirteenth Division's headquarters. Ukitake, who had arrived scant minutes before (it was one of his good days, and he had decided to get as much of his work done as possible before the coughing set in again), had let him in personally. On the surface, the Sixth Division captain looked the same as always, cool gray eyes giving away nothing of his thoughts. But Ukitake had known him long enough to see the tense way he held himself.

"May I see your personnel records?" Byakuya had asked crisply. Ukitake blinked. That was an odd request.

"Of course," he said, and led Byakuya to the rooms where all the Division's reports were kept.

Except for in Twelfth Division, computers hadn't quite made their way into the Soul Society yet- all reports had to be written out by hand. This meant that the record rooms were big- they had to be, to hold over two millenniums' worth of papers.

Byakuya had ignored the vast majority of the room, and gone straight to the section of shelves that held the missing-in-action records. These sheaves of papers, bound by red leather dust-jackets, held the names, ranks, and last known locations of all the Thirteenth Division shinigami ever to go missing without a trace. Each Division had its own collection- what did Byakuya want with Thirteenth's lists?

Running a considering hand over the row of books, Byakuya ignored the earlier lists completely, and picked up the five most recent books. He retreated to a corner of the room, and flipped through the earliest book until he found a page that must have looked promising. Placing several sheets of paper on the floor in front of him, he opened the leather satchel that hung off his shoulder (Where did that come from? Ukitake thought) and set up the writing materials he had brought with him. After a silent minute of reading, the antique pen began its slow dance across the paper.

Five minutes passed, in which Byakuya continued to write, paying no heed to the Division coming to life around him. Shinigami went past in the corridor, glancing into the room and doing double-takes when they saw both their own Captain, and the Captain of Sixth, sitting in silence on the polished wooden floor. Ukitake himself got steadily more and more mystified, until he could hold back the curiosity no longer.

"What are you doing, Byakuya?" he asked. "I don't really see how lists of missing shinigami could hold your attention for so long." Ukitake remembered well how quickly the Kuchiki head got bored, even if he did try to hide it admirably well- Byakuya had once been in Thirteenth Division.

Byakuya merely glanced at him, and continued to write. "I am going over the MIA lists for the last two centuries. In other words, the time when Aizen was in power."

Ukitake, about to say something else, abruptly shut his mouth. He blinked, his eyes narrowing as he considered Byakuya's words. Finally, he said, "You're thinking he might have tried to make other Vizards, aren't you?"

Byakuya nodded. "Muguruma-san gave me the idea. He told me it had been frustrating, knowing Aizen had been free to do anything, even to make more Vizards, for all they - the Vizards - knew. When I returned to Sixth Division yesterday, I read through our entire MIA list, from the time the Division was founded up to the present day. In the first century, we lost sixteen shinigami to unknown causes, three in the fifth century, five in the tenth, and four in the fifteenth. From the second century onward, the number has averaged out at about seven a century."

He looked back at his notes, and added, "From what I have been able to see, Thirteenth Division's record is slightly better- five MIAs a century. I have also checked Fifth Division's, and their rate is similar."

Ukitake blinked. "You did all this in one day?"

Byakuya looked up, and coolly met his gaze. "It took up most of last night as well. Can you guess how many shinigami have gone missing during this last century?"

Ukitake frowned. "How many?"

"Thirty-four from Sixth Division, twenty-three from Thirteenth, and forty-one from Fifth," Byakuya said concisely. "That's an increase of over a thousand percent, in Fifth Division's case. Around three-quarters of these were later recovered from Hueco Mundo. The remaining quarter is still not accounted for, and coincidentally, these would be the shinigami who disappeared before the Winter War had started."

Ukitake rocked backwards, and gave a low whistle. "That's serious. Why has no-one picked up on it before?"

"I would say that the war has kept us too busy to bother with ancient history," Byakuya said dryly. "Most of these missing shinigami disappeared during the first half of the twentieth century. The numbers decrease somewhat after that."

Sighing, Ukitake stepped forward. His paperwork would have to wait. "Let me have a look at these lists?"

Byakuya handed him a sheaf of paper, covered in the Sixth-Division captain's neat, clear writing. Ukitake studied the lists carefully.

He'd known these shinigami. Koji Satou, an excellent tactician, who had been his fifth seat once upon a time. Miyuki Minamoto, who loved kittens, and brought Ukitake to meet them every time her cats had a litter. Emi Fukuyama, who could have given Renji a run for his money in the brash redhead stakes. On and on the list went, ending at Gorou Taniyama, whose disappearance Ukitake could still remember, if only for the wailing his wife had done when she had to be told.

Ukitake suddenly blinked. There. He read through the list again, and coughed. "Ah, Byakuya. These shinigami all went missing in the Living World."

Byakuya paused, his eyes flitting back over the page he was working on. "So they did, the vast majority of them. Could it be that simple?"

"Everyone knows that the Living World is the place to go if you don't want to be observed," Ukitake mused, gazing distractedly at the paper in his hand. "Aizen, Gin, and Tousen all knew how the Hollowfication process worked. Any one of them could have been the one to administer it." He looked back at Byakuya, who was staring at him with those blank grey eyes. "Please excuse me, I think I have an idea."

"What sort of an idea?" Byakuya asked.

"I'm going to call a captains' meeting, and while that's being confirmed, I think I'll have a poke about in the mission logs and the off-duty records of Third, Fifth and Ninth Divisions. We'll see if Aizen or his traitors were in the Living World when those shinigami went missing."

Ukitake turned and strode out of the office, purpose fresh in his mind. He had a very definite feeling that Byakuya was onto something big.

* * *

All eleven of the other captains were gathered in the First Division meeting room when Byakuya and Ukitake walked in. Kurotsuchi was already starting to fidget- a sure sign that he'd been dragged away from some unholy experiment. Zaraki was oddly still, and the way he stood, quietly facing the captains opposite him instead of bickering with Kurotsuchi, made Ukitake suspect that he knew at least something of why the meeting had been called.

Unohana had taken her position at the head of the double row of captains, as was her right as the new Captain-General. Ukitake felt a pain in his chest that had nothing to do with his illness as he looked at her, remembering the man who had once held that position. Yamamoto had died during the last battle of the Winter War, and the wound left in the Seireitei by his loss was still raw. Shunsui and Ukitake felt it more severely than most- they had once been Yamamoto's protégés.

"Finally!" Kurotsuchi sneered, his shrill voice jarring Ukitake's concentration. "Now get on with whatever it is, so we can get back to our work!"

"It ain't your place ta give orders, Kurotsuchi," Zaraki rumbled, his hand drifting down to the hilt of his sword in a silent warning. Kurotsuchi opened his mouth to argue, then noticed Unohana's steely gaze, and shut up, settling for glaring ferociously at Zaraki instead.

Satisfied with the unruly Twelfth-Division captain's response, Unohana turned to Ukitake, and nodded once. Ukitake returned the gesture, as he and Byakuya took their places in the lines.

"So, what's this about?" Renji asked, looking across to his former captain. "You were looking at Fifth's missing lists last night- does that have anything to do with this?"

Byakuya nodded stiffly. "To put it simply, the number of shinigami that have gone missing in action during the last century is much higher than average. Ukitake-taichou and I have been looking over our respective Divisions' lists, and the numbers are much the same in both."

"How much higher than average?" Soi Fon asked, cutting straight to the fact.

"Five or ten times the usual amount," Byakuya said. "These numbers do not include those taken during the Winter War, either. During the first half of the twentieth century is when most of the disappearances occurred."

"And most of those went missing in the Living World," Ukitake put in. As one, the captains turned to face him. "During the times when either Aizen or Ichimaru, less usually Tousen, were there as well."

"Hollowfication?" Shunsui guessed, his expression entirely serious.

"Most probably," Byakuya agreed. "The circumstances are entirely too convenient for me to believe that it was all just a big coincidence." He passed a sheaf of papers to the Eighth-Division captain, who whistled quietly as he read them.

"Why do you think they stopped in the fifties?" Shunsui said, passing the papers to Soi Fon, who took them without a word.

Ukitake shrugged; Byakuya said, "I would guess that that was when Aizen decided he needed the Hougyoku."

"Took him long enough," Kurotsuchi snorted derisively. "I suppose he was trying out different ways of Hollowfication. That's probably why some of those strange Hollows started turning up around then."

_Harsh truths,_ Ukitake thought, as his jaw clenched in some strange emotion. The idea of shinigami being stripped of their minds and turned into ruthless killing machines was deplorable.

_Then again, 'deplorable' was really Aizen's keyword, wasn't it?_

"Do you think any ended up as Vizards?" Kiriko Ozawa, the new captain of First Division, suggested. Ukitake knew her, to a certain extent- she had been one of his and Shunsui's classmates in the Academy, and had held the third seated position in First Division for over a thousand years.

"It's debatable," Ukitake told her, thinking aloud. "From what I know of Hollowfication, there's no chance of your survival as yourself unless you can defeat the Hollow within you. That gives a possibility of survival, but with other methods, it could be different. There's no way of knowing for sure, unless some of these missing shinigami turn up on our doorstep one day with their Hollow masks."

Kiriko furrowed her brows in thought. "As Third Seat, I was the one in charge of our personnel lists. But I never noticed that so many people were going missing."

"No-one did," Ukitake smiled wryly, "or we would have heard about this when it was happening. It's not your fault."

"I never said it was," Kiriko said dryly. "There's the possibility that Aizen used Kyoka Suigetsu to reassure us that nothing happened. Fifth Division had the highest number of missing shinigami, so if I were him, I would have used the hypnosis on whoever looked after the records there, to make damn sure they didn't notice."

"And none of the other divisions had so many go missing. If someone had noticed, it would have been in Fifth Division." Ukitake finished. "What makes it even odder to the observer is that Fifth isn't a front-line division. I think you're probably right about Kyoka Suigetsu."

"It's a bitter excuse," Kiriko said, and laughed harshly. Ukitake couldn't help but agree.

* * *

After the meeting was over, the first thing most of the captains did, once they got back to their respective divisions, was look over their own MIA lists. Vice-captains were told, and within a day, the theory was all over the Seireitei.

People began to remember their missing comrades, and wonder if they were still out there somewhere, with a Vizard's mask and powers, or a Hollow's lust for souls.

The Winter War was over. But the possibility was looming large that Aizen might have left them with other things to worry about.

* * *

MIA totals from 1891-1960

1st Division- 1 in Soul Society, 13 in the Living World

2nd Division- 0 in SS, 19 in LW

3rd Division- 5 in SS, 36 in LW

4th Division- 0 in SS, 6 in LW

5th Division- 4 in SS, 41 in LW

6th Division- 2 in SS, 34 in LW

7th Division- 3 in LW, 21 in LW

8th Division- 1 in SS, 17 in LW

9th Division- 3 in SS, 24 in LW

10th Division- 1 in SS, 26 in LW

11th Division- 6 in SS, 35 in LW

12th Division- 0 in SS, 7 in LW

13th Division- 3 in SS, 23 in LW


End file.
